...But Not By This Much

...they should not be winning by this much.  Not by over 10 games, rolling merrily toward the division title for over a month now, ever since the Beantown Beatdown, virtually unchallenged.

The Yankees' main stress point going into the season was their starting pitching.  If it held up—and it largely has—they should have been able to at least seriously challenge even an extremely successful Boston club, and despite the disparity in injuries.

Take a look at the players.  Very few if any of Boston's starters have greatly exceeded expectations, and some have underperformed.  The Red Sox bench is very thin.  The Yankees' starters, at least coming into the season, were generally better, and their bench and bullpen were deeper.

Once the Yanks' two starting rookies proved they were more than major-league ready, this should have been a dogfight.

It was not.  And there were, I think, three main reasons why:

—The wholesale implosion, for whatever reason, of Bird and Sanchez.  I have discussed this ad nauseam, so I won't go into it again.  But suffice it to say, these were two positions where the Yanks seemed to have a significant advantage over the Sox going into the season.  As it turned out, they did not.

Almost every other position-by-position matchup has usually been offset.  For instance, Gardy's worst-ever year has been matched by yet another disappointing Jackie Bradley, Jr. season; Walker's follies by Rafael Devers' reversion to the mean, etc.

—J.D. Martinez's advantage over Giancarlo Stanton.  This is an unfair comparison in some ways.  Martinez has been able to simply DH, while Stanton has had to play constantly, and often in the outfield, thanks to Cashman's decision to get rid of most of our back-up outfielders just before the Judge injury.  G. has probably done at least some of this with a barking hammie.

However:  the fact remains that Stanton's stats have declined significantly from his terrific 2017 season, while Martinez's have not.

There's also this:  Stanton last night became only the 8th man in MLB history to strike out 200 or more times a season (some of them did it more than once).  He has an outside chance at setting the all-time, single-season strikeout record.

He is also the second Yankee in as many years to go over 200 whiffs, after Aaron Judge's 208 strikeouts last year.

Think of that:  one-quarter of the biggest strikeout totals in history, came from Yankees players in the last two years.

—The tangibles.  That is, things that are usually called "intangibles."  But obviously, we can see and calculate them.

Take our making one in three double-plays last night.  That was flukish—but the Yankees have turned the fewest double plays in the league this year, some 13 fewer than Boston.

We have also made more errors, stolen fewer bases, drawn fewer walks, collected fewer hits than the Red Sox.  Not a lot, in any one category.  But they add up.  We play a sloppier, more distracted game than they do.  Day in, and day out.

We do, as predicted, lead the AL in home runs.  I think the total is 242 after Neil "The Walker" Walker.  We are closing in on an all-time Yankees team high, and while it's unlikely we will break the MLB all-time record, we will probably finish as one of the top 5-6 teams in homers in a season—ever.

The teams ahead of us now:

1997 Seattle       264
2005 Texas         260
1996 Baltimore  257
2010 Toronto     250
2000 Houston    249
2012 Yankees    245
1996 Oakland    243

Notice a pattern?  None of those teams won a World Series.  None of them reached the World Series. Only two teams here even reached the league championship series.

I think the only conclusion from all this is, while the Yankees have been hampered by injuries this year,which would probably have "doomed" them to finish second in any case, much of the difference between them and the Red Sox is due to management's failures in instruction, personnel, and philosophy.